home ec homeschool

Running a household is not that easy. It’s more than just keeping a home nice and tidy. Learning how to cook, clean, and be a domestic engineer of sorts requires skill and patience. You should not be doing it all on your own, however. Even the youngest children can help with cooking, cleaning, and other household chores. Here are five home economic skills to teach your kids that will set them up for a lifetime of success in and outside your home.

5 Home Economic Skills to Teach Your Kids

Cooking

Teaching your kids simple cooking skills like measurements and proportions, safe food preparation, and following recipes are essential for young people to know to survive on their own (eventually) and stay healthy. I like to think of the home economic skills they learn growing up not only as things that benefit our household but will serve them well moving forward.

Simple recipes using ground beef, vegetables, and chicken will help your children learn how to make food from scratch. Cooking with fresh ingredients is healthy and will save you money!

Meal Planning

To go along with cooking, it’s important to teach your children how to plan for meals. Teach them how to use a tool like Real Plans or sit down with them and plan out breakfast, lunch, and dinner on paper or in a planner. Meal prepping one day a week can help you and your family save time. Preparing the ingredients, freezing meals when necessary, and having the proportions correct will help your children get involved and your meal times run smoothly.

Budgeting

Money may not seem like a relevant topic for young people not contributing to the household finances, but it’s never too early to help your children understand how to save and what to spend money on. Being self-sufficient and living off what we have at home is helpful, but it’s good to let the kids know that everything isn’t “free”. There are utilities and household expenses to pay. Without revealing your whole financial status, you can start by teaching your kids ways to make money and help them set up their own budget.

It is also essential that kids learn how to balance a checkbook! I know checks are not used as often today as in the past but balancing your accounts is still very important. Programs like Quicken are fantastic and there are also phone apps that can been very helpful.

Laundry

Having your children be responsible for their own laundry can be helpful in running your household efficiently and giving them an added responsibility. Teach them how to use the washer, separate colors, and use proper cycles as well as which clothes to machine dry, lay flat, and hang dry. Since we teach our children vintage skills, doing laundry by hand is something I have insisted that my children know. It’s a great skill to have to prepare in case gas or electricity is not available, and it saves money!

Household Cleaning

Teaching your children to keep a house neat and tidy starts with modeling the behavior. It may help to set up a cleaning schedule and give your children a list of tasks to complete. Sweeping, vacuuming, dusting, scrubbing counters, mopping floors, and doing dishes are just a few important tasks that make a household run smoothly. Every member of the household should be responsible for some chores, and keeping a clean house is a major part of these duties. Lastly, make sure your kids know how to properly make a bed. See: How to Make a Bed in 12 Steps

Other Home Economic Skills to Teach

Gardening to grow food

Sewing and mending

Basic car maintenance (or at the very least WHEN to have maintenance done)

Building a food pantry and canning

How to do yearly taxes

Manners

Children need to understand and practice vintage skills as much as adults need to model them. These five home economic skills to teach your kids are essential for any family, especially the modern homesteading family. Practice these skills at home with your own children.

Whatever home economic skills you decide to teach in your home, your kids will be ahead of the game and more prepared than most these days. Sadly home economics is rarely taught in the public school system and many parents are not teaching them either; but we still need them.

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